Families Urge Bloomberg to Save After-School Vouchers

Advocates say the cuts would affect families in after-school programs like the one at the United Talmudical Academy in Brooklyn.Credit
Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

For uncommonly large Orthodox Jewish families, they are a lifeline: vouchers from the city for after-school care, redeemable at a yeshiva of their choice.

“If I didn’t have it, my head would spin,” said Idy Herskowitz, a mother of 11 from Brooklyn who qualified for vouchers and enrolls five of her children in an after-school program. “It gives me time to take care of my other children.”

As part of citywide budget cuts beginning next fiscal year, the Bloomberg administration has threatened to eliminate the 12-year-old, $16 million program, which is open to many needy families for use at schools and day care centers but which has overwhelmingly benefited Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn neighborhoods like Borough Park and Williamsburg.

In response, City Council members, community leaders and parents from those well-organized neighborhoods orchestrated a swift and furious campaign to persuade Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to save the voucher program, as he did in 2004.

They have produced more than 30,000 letters from parents to the mayor, delivering them in dramatic fashion — in 14 large cardboard boxes — to City Hall on Wednesday afternoon.

Councilmen Simcha Felder and Bill de Blasio, whose districts include parts of Borough Park, have played a “good cop, bad cop” routine to pressure the mayor. Mr. Felder, a close political ally of Mr. Bloomberg’s, has privately leaned on him to intervene, while Mr. de Blasio held a news conference last week angrily denouncing the mayor and the budget cut.

Advocacy groups have squeezed Mr. Bloomberg even more, arguing that cutting the voucher program would unfairly affect Orthodox Jews.

“This is something which many families in our community have come to rely on,” said David Zwiebel, the executive vice president of Agudath Israel of America, an advocacy organization. “We’re doing our best to remind the mayor that eliminating the vouchers will have a disproportionate impact on one segment of the community.”

More than 2,000 children benefit from the coupons, formally called Priority 7 vouchers, which are obtained through referrals from people who work in social services, including rabbis, teachers and social workers. In January, citing budget cuts, the city’s Administration for Children’s Services said it expected to eliminate 950 of the vouchers in the fall. In the agency’s latest budget proposal, it would cut the remaining 1,100 vouchers.

“These child care vouchers have been awarded since the mid-1990s to lower-income N.Y.C. families with social service needs,” Sharman Stein, a spokeswoman for the Administration for Children’s Services, said in a statement. “Given the budget restraints we’re forced to plan for, we have to help the city’s neediest and most vulnerable families first.”

A typical after-school program runs from about 3 to 6 p.m. At the United Talmudical Academy in Borough Park, for example, children play games, make art projects related to Jewish holidays and snack on chicken nuggets and fruit.

The voucher program began in the 1990s, when money became available after federal welfare changes. A miniscandal followed when Milton Balkany, a prominent rabbi and political contributor, quietly recruited thousands of Orthodox parents to sign up — at the behest of a City Hall aide, he later said.

Child-welfare advocates complained that the vouchers had been awarded disproportionately to families in a few neighborhoods in Brooklyn — Borough Park, Williamsburg, Crown Heights and Midwood.

Today, the agency gives out 22,000 child care vouchers using a priority scale. The highest priority groups include families that are under the watch of the child-welfare agency, children with special needs and children whose parents are on welfare. The seventh group of vouchers, numbering just more than 2,000, is set aside for families that are not otherwise involved with a city agency but have “family dysfunction, family needs or family problems.” Each voucher pays up to $288 a week for a child’s care, and many families receive more than one.

There are 1,422 families on waiting lists for Priority 7 vouchers.

The Administration for Children’s Services plans to cut an additional 1,000 child care vouchers for families who have an ill or incapacitated parent, and for families with a parent who is looking for work. Both of those categories, Priority 8 and 9, respectively, ranked lower than Priority 7. The city plans to maintain funding for Priorities 1 through 6.

Even now, most of the people who receive Priority 7 vouchers are Orthodox Jewish families in Brooklyn, a constituency that Mr. Bloomberg has carefully courted. And of the nearly 100 after-school programs, an overwhelming majority are run out of yeshivas in Brooklyn. (A handful are in secular day care centers in the Bronx and Manhattan.)

Members of the Orthodox community say their families often get by on one income, since mothers typically stay home and care for the children. And most pay private-school tuition, since they send their children to yeshivas.

“People don’t earn a lot of money,” said Yoel Holtzman, the head administrator at Tiferes Bnos, a girls’ school in Williamsburg with an after-school program for 75 children. “In some small apartments, some children come home to 11, 12 people in the family. I really think without after-school care, the children will probably go crazy. There will be parents and children who have to start taking pills. It’s really going to affect them tremendously.”

It will require more than $16 million to save the entire program. (An aide to Mr. Bloomberg said that reinstating the vouchers was still “under discussion” as part of budget talks with the City Council.)

Privately, several advocates of the vouchers said they were optimistic that Mr. Bloomberg would preserve the program.

Mr. de Blasio, chairman of the Council’s General Welfare Committee, said he was not so sure.

“I’m not confident, at this point, that any of the restorations that we need are happening,” he said. “I don’t see much flexibility from this administration.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Families Urge Bloomberg to Save After-School Vouchers. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe